All right, so let's get back to the radical ideas. This is socialism. So, you know, socialism, communism, fascism, capitalism, we'll go through all the types.
There are many different types of socialism. I don't know why we said this. Sure, we can say whatever. They're all traced to Rousseau's critique of property, the organic society and what constitutes the greater good. Okay, we don't need any supporting evidence or any foundation for that.
But sure, let's do that. Okay, so there's... three types that they talk about here, utopian, scientific, and social democratic. So utopian socialism, again, I don't know how you would have this discussion without talking about capitalism first.
So capitalism establishes private property rights. So it becomes the thing that socialism is critiquing, right? So it says that we need public ownership.
How do you have ownership? You have to have ownership. So ownership would then be something that has been entrenched either by the state or by the monarch or whoever says they own the land, the crown lands, right? And so public ownership would mean that it's something like a commons, I guess, but we would still have to designate who would get access. And so, you know, it was always public ownership when the state owns it, but it's public ownership because everybody gets access to it.
Okay, sure. Democratic social institutions, sure, we can talk about those. I've got an example we'll talk about in a minute, participatory budgeting.
So instead of having... resources allocated arbitrarily, we have the people participate in forms of allocating resources. The eradication of want, okay, maybe I really want a cheeseburger. So what's the difference between want and need? This is one of the capitalist assumptions is that there is no difference between want and need.
Now, There's definitely a difference between need when I need oxygen or I need water or I need access to clean drinking water or I will get diarrhea and die as I think is the number three or four killer of children around the world. And so, you know, there are certainly biological needs, but we also have like a human right to food differentiation because humans need food that's not the same. Human right to shaving, human right to menstrual products.
I mean... We've just recently stopped taxing menstrual products as if menstrual products were just a they were a want not a need right so the ways in which want and need is framed is very much socially conditioned and so they use examples communes agricultural co-ops and public housing sure okay fine here's some participatory budgeting interesting idea People participate in it. Denver, Tallinn, capital of tiny Estonia, asked its inhabitants to propose ideas on how to spend 1 million euro of its municipal budget. Residents came up with 132 ideas proposing to add more cycling lanes, build community gardens and playgrounds and install an outdoor gym.
They also asked for more benches and drinking fountains. This month, everyone aged above 14 was called to vote on these ideas to decide which project they want to implement in their district. So look, okay, we can get into Tallinn. Tallinn is a very interesting place.
It's kind of the center of cybersecurity. But yeah, participatory budgeting, but allowing 14-year-olds to participate because they are going to enjoy many of these things. Wondering what this process is?
Here's the name. Participatory budgeting. I don't know why we're translating Europe, sure. I mean, there's experiments in North America.
Participatory budgeting is becoming some sort of buzzword in democratic circles. More and more European cities are adopting the idea. Civil society organizations are pushing for it.
But what exactly is participatory budgeting? Well... It's the shared decision between local government and citizens on how to spend a part of the municipal budget. In practice, cities ask their inhabitants to decide where to invest their money.
So how does it work? There's no one-size-fits-all. Every city can use a different approach to participatory budgeting, but there are some common aspects to the process. The first step is always organization and planning. Cities need to decide how they want to give a voice to the residents and what percentage of the budget will be dedicated to citizen initiatives.
They also need to inform their inhabitants to make sure that people will actually participate. During the second phase citizens come up with ideas and negotiate with government players to decide where to allocate the local resources. And the third step is implementation.
The city takes note of what citizens ask for and makes sure that these projects are carried out. Let's take Tallinn for instance. In August the City Council started to prepare the participatory budgeting process. In September residents were called to submit their ideas.
In October and November these ideas were evaluated and selected for their feasibility by an expert committee. And in the first half of December citizens were called to vote on the initiative they wanted for their district. Finally, next year the city will implement the most supported project for each district.
Tallinn is a good example of how participatory budgeting works. So, you know, this is a very clear example, but we don't have any examples in the text of what this is. This could be framed as a socialist plot. It largely just seems as forms of democratic participation, but the democratic participation and the allocation of resources is by definition here, utopian socialism, I guess.
So as long as we keep it to 1%, if it's 51%, is that socialist? You know, sure. So this is what I'm saying.
Like, if you want to dismiss ideas, do it in a boring way. So here we've got Scientific socialism. So this is a specific framing of historical materialism. Again, those words already make you shut off your brain.
Largely based on Western ideas of rationality and science. We could do it in a more kind of specific way. It's pretty easy. Here's historical materialism. Right here.
The oil sector for the last 50 years has made $3 billion a day. I wonder what they've done with that. I'm sure they've just sat on it.
and not used it in any way to influence political outcomes to make sure that that $3 billion a day doesn't continue to be $3 billion a day. Historical materialism. Why?
They are changing the course of history with their material capabilities. This is a really easy example. We don't have any examples of the text.
And so, you know, capitalism as a mode of production creates class antagonisms between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. I've got an easier example of this. It's right here. This is the bastion of capitalism, producing in a market system a supply where it's got inelastic demand because you need insulin or you die.
Capitalism frames this as a want. Socialism would frame this as need. Hence, all of those countries understand it as need and intervene to make sure that it doesn't become just a want.
Because this, by definition, could kill people if they don't have access to it. Or, as there were cases of... people trying to make their own insulin or using their dog's insulin, which is not designed for people, but because they couldn't afford it. So yeah, when we're talking about historical materialism, we could make it more radical if we provide a little bit of data. So I guess we don't provide any data, so it doesn't seem radical at all.
And so we frame it as things like workers are commodified to produce surplus value for capitalists. This is the labor theory of value, which has huge problems unless you're... a specific brand of Marxist that I've run into that insists that it's still true to this day. You do you, right? Okay.
And that workers will eventually revolt and overthrow capitalism. Now, this is something that both socialists and communists believe. They tend to predict, what is it?
They predict seven of every one actually crises that happen. They constantly predict that crises will happen and then people will rise up and overthrow the system. It largely discounts all that other ideological stuff we talked about earlier.
You know, I think of that as more Marxist, not socialist per se, because socialists are trying to work within capitalism, you know, do the stuff around the edges, the municipal stuff. Marxists want to overthrow the system and see it as that. But sure, let's call this scientific socialism. This is just another critique of this idea that's referenced as like net zero. This is just a criticism of net zero.
This is the ways in which that $3 billion is deployed. So we've been through this. We did corporate social responsibility.
We have ESG, environmentally sustainable governance. And now we're into the net zero. These are different ways of greenwashing, the ways in which fossil fuel industries try to say that they are helping in global climate change.
We have everybody in BP, Shell, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Walmart, BlackRock, United and Delta, Nestle and Cargill, JBS, all saying they're trying to do net zero. Fifteen hundred corporations say they want to do net zero. Why? Because it's too vague to mean anything.
It disguises their intent to ramp up emissions intensive productions. It relies on distractions. It's ignorant of science and logic.
Just basic physics can't have more without putting more inputs in. And investment status quo, the math doesn't make sense. It results in profit over people on the planet, and it rejects systemic change.
And so we get situations like this where the political structures, because they are so heavily invested in the systems, you know, billions of dollars every year go to subsidies of fossil fuels. I We were talking about one last year, just as people are shifting off of natural gas, for example, the natural gas provision gets caught in this death spiral. That's what they're calling it.
Enbridge is calling this in Ontario, where if people are moving away from from traditional fossil fuels, they're no longer going to have the same revenues in order to maintain the system. So those who continue to be on it will end up paying more and more, which inevitably is those who can't afford it, which are people, poor, elderly, or unable to change their reliance on natural gas because it's expensive to retrofit your house. That's why the governments are trying to support it. So what then Enbridge is saying to the government is, if you want us to maintain the system, and you don't want us to pass on the prices to everybody else. You're going to have to give us subsidies.
So the structures are in place that have been built with this $3 billion a day over the last 50 years to do these things where you end up with like the Pope being more radical than the Democrats. Are we willing to call the Pope a radical now? This is where we end up when we do this stuff.
So I mean, the really easy examples are to talk about materialism. So banks make $30 billion in overdraft fees. That means they're literally taking $30 billion away from poor.
That's an easy example. I don't, it's a, sorry, it's a tweet, right? It's a tweet.
How we don't have any evidence for these ideas and how we try to produce them as boring as possible is the weirdest de-radicalization of radical politics, right? And so what we get done is, you know, the third variation is democratic socialism or social democracy shares a critique of capitalism, but calls for evolutionary change rather than revolutionary change. The UN is a Fabian socialist institution.
Fabian was a famous military commander who, instead of directly attacking his enemy, surrounded the city and cut off its supply lines. And so Fabianism or Fabian socialism says we're not going to directly challenge capitalism. We're going to slowly chip away at it as we go. So you can do this with the UN. The UN is a Fabian socialist institution.
It says, oh, my God, look at all the consequences of these terrible things that we're doing. How should we fix them? Well, that's up to individual states.
So it's never going to challenge any of the systems that currently exist. It's going to say you have human rights. And because you have human rights, it's a state obligation to protect those human rights.
Global climate change is real. These are things that need to be done. We need to take radical and drastic change immediately. What radical and drastic change?
We're not going to say. We're not cutting off that $3 billion a day. We're not touching that. We are just saying that it needs to be done. We're not going to tell you how to do them, right?
And so it's very much a mixed public-private enterprise, robust social welfare programs and policies, grassroots decision-makings, CCF, NDP. Maybe. I think this is most liberal democracies, honestly. Some people don't want to call it socialism, I guess, because we're ceding territory to the people who get to set the... We're ceding territory to groups when we let them define the words that we use and how we use them.
So do what you want. But this idea of socialism, I consider the... socialist.
We can critique socialism and those who argue against socialism, right? Fire departments of socialism, we should leave this to the free market, libertarian Spider-Man. So yeah, socialism as per the textbook.